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Sunday, September 16, 2012

Featured: Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

Hardcover

"A good street photographer must possess many talents: an eye
for detail, light, and composition; impeccable timing; a populist or
humanitarian outlook; and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot,
shoot, shoot and never miss a moment. It is hard enough to find these
qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and
mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and
rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone
with no formal training and no network of peers.

Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who
from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs
worldwide—from France to New York City, to Chicago and dozens of other
countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing
both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the
humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life
in America’s post-war golden age.

It wasn’t until realtor and amateur historian John Maloof stumbled
upon a box of anonymous negatives in a Chicago auction house in 2007
that any of her marvelous work saw the light of day. Presented here for
the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer
collects the first wave of the best of her incredible body of work—much
of which still hasn’t been enlarged or in some case even developed into
negatives. Hidden treasures like this don’t come along every day, and
powerHouse is excited and honored to present this astounding body of
never-before-seen work to the public at large.

There is still very little known about the life of Vivian Maier. What
is known is that she was born in New York in 1926 and worked as a nanny
for a family on Chicago’s North Shore during the 50s and 60s. Seemingly
without a family of her own, the children she cared for eventually
acted as caregivers for Maier herself in the autumn of her life. She
took hundreds of thousands of photographs in her lifetime, but never
shared them with anyone. Maier lost possession of her art when her
storage locker was sold off for non-payment. She passed away in 2009 at
the age of 83." -Powerhouse